"We are so ignorant about the abiotic processes in the atmosphere that we cannot immediately exclude the claims that life exists today." -Joseph O'Rourke

One of the most painful things about Venus news is that even in LPI's, the speaker usually wastes a lot of time before getting to anything good. There's the rub though. If we knew jack about Venus the phosphine discovery would have been easily confirmable or disprovable. Thus we need to know more no matter what. This one does not start to go over anything interesting till 20:00. Starting slow and ending on a flurry of good stuff is pretty normal, and here we go.

• At 20:00 he's got a nice slide mapping two varieties of crater and volcano distribution. We've all seen the random distribution of craters dating Venus surface before, but this slide has a subdivision by implying pristine craters are younger than those that are infilled. 
• At 26:55 he starts getting into counterarguments about a stagnant-lid. He shows beautiful slides noting possible subduction. He will return to this idea when wrapping up. 
  
• At 39:37 there's a great slide showing a current hypothesis, the "squishy-lid" as opposed to a stagnant-lid. 
• The big reveal he saves for the end involves a possibility of a Basal Magma Ocean (BMO). The implications are pretty huge. If Venus lithosphere is floating, it follows physics more like Titan than Earth. And there are more dynamo possibilities. This is why he titles his lecture as he did. If a BMO then Venus is cooling slower than Earth, if not... then Venus should behave more Earth-like. 

What this LPI really is, it's one of those occasions where someone asks questions and halfheartedly implies predictions right before a probe tests the premise. So this LPI is a part of the VERITAS mission, setting up hypothesis to be tortured. There's a lot of innuendo in this lecture as he invokes the name of Sue Smrekar a few times. He's often not coming out and saying stuff, but he's tempted.   

One thing that planetary scientists are all thinking but not telling the general public for reasons that are probably more condescending than secret, is granite. We don't actually know how tectonics started on Earth. There are many old professors who will die on the hill they've been on all their lives. It all comes down to when and where granite started forming, and exactly how, the exact chemical process. Finding any granite at all on Venus, or absolutely none, is key to forwarding a debate that many have built their lives around. 

But then there's another thing, the resurfacing event, millions not billions of years ago. This isn't unrelated to the search for granite, and because of it, the absence of granite will have a great big asterisk no matter what, but there's a cool catch that I want to call attention to. 

In Natalie Starkey's book Fire & Ice she writes that Olympus Mons is so massive, its bulk would melt and sink were it on Earth... Now we have a mechanism to test for the Venus resurfacing. How epic is that?